Archives For architecture

3

The Deconstruction Economy

piles of bricksOne cannot talk about sustainability for long without eventually encountering “resources.” Every product stream, mechanical process and human action has a source of incoming energy. Our capitalistic market has a couple of favorites that craft the battlements for daily conflicts between corporations and citizens: wood, oil, water, coal. Businesses stuck in narrow focuses of how to utilize and maximize stores of natural resources are fending environmentalists off with a stick and the fight will only get more painful. Sooner or later they will lose. Our country will no longer drill for new oil and the amount of coal we burn each year will progressively decline. What will define the next surge of resource harvesting in the economy over the next century?

Well renewable energy is an easy pick. Wind and solar power will continue to be perfected to peak levels of efficiency and their position in the marketplace will continue to grow, but one of the greatest latent sources of value in our culture is decidedly unnatural. It is available almost anywhere in the country though its particular characteristics vary from one source to the next. Public demand for it is currently a small portion of the greater marketplace but it will only rise over time. The source is our existing buildings. The resulting growth market is deconstruction. Continue Reading…

Economic 
5

Smart Grid? Try No Grid

Imagine turning off a main road onto the quiet street of a new suburban housing neighborhood. Down the road waits tree-lined streets of energy efficient homes with their organic gardens and hybrids parked in the driveway, but no electric meter hanging on the wall. On the right you pass a building with few windows and judicious planting. Instead of a development “clubhouse” with a substandard weight room that no one uses and cabinets holding communal board games, the structure is actually an anaerobic power plant that takes the food waste of the neighborhood and turns it into the power for their homes. Throughout your trip you travel under no high tension wires. You dip under no telephone poles.

Impossible? Maybe not.

Continue Reading…

Urban Planning 
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LEED. Yay or Nay?

leedFifteen years ago the United States Green Building Council coalesced into being and created a standard for rating the level of sustainability achieved by our additions to our built environment. We know the system today as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design or LEED. Over the years the system has attracted many followers but also its share of critics that point out the inevitable imperfections in the system when in reality, despite its flaws the system was and still is exactly what the movement needs. Continue Reading…

Political